Fritz Julius Kuhn - Biography

Biography

He was the son of Georg Kuhn and Julia Justyna Beuth in Germany. During World War I, Kuhn earned an Iron Cross as a German infantry lieutenant. After the war, he graduated from the University of Munich with a master's degree in chemical engineering. In the 1920s, Kuhn moved to Mexico. In 1928, he moved to the United States and, in 1934, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States.

After a Congressional committee headed by Samuel Dickstein, concluded that the Friends of New Germany organization supported a branch of German dictator Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party in America, the Nazi government declared on 1 March 1938 that no German national ("Reichsdeutsche") could be a member of the Bund, and that no Nazi emblems were to be used by the organization. On 19 March 1936 Hitler placed Fritz Kuhn as the head of the German American Bund.

Kuhn, while describing the Bund as "sympathetic to the Hitler government," denied that the organization received money or took orders from the government of Germany. Kuhn also denied that the Bund had any agenda of introducing fascism to the United States.

Kuhn enlisted thousands of Americans to join using what would be criticized as antisemitic, anticommunist, and pro-German propaganda. One of his first tasks was to plan a trip to Germany with 50 of his American followers. The purpose was to be in the presence of Hitler and to witness personally National-Socialism in practice.

At this time, Germany was preparing to host the 1936 Olympics. Kuhn anticipated a warm welcome from Hitler, but the encounter was a disappointment. This did not stop Kuhn from elaborating more propaganda to his followers once he returned to the United States about how Hitler acknowledged him as the "American Führer".

On February 20, 1939, Kuhn held the largest and most publicized rally in the Bund's history at the Madison Square Garden. Twenty-thousand attended and witnessed a Nazi parade ceremony and a speech by Fritz Kuhn where he stated "The Bund is fighting shoulder to shoulder with patriotic Americans to protect America from a race that is not the American race, that is not even a white race ...The Jews are enemies of the United States." During his speech, a protester rushed the stage and had to be hauled off by security.

As his popularity grew, so did the tension against him. Not only Jewish-Americans, but also German-Americans who did not want to be associated with Nazis, protested against the Bund. These protests were occasionally violent, making the Bund front page news in America. In response to the outrage of Jewish war veterans, Congress passed a law requiring agents of foreign principals to register with the State Department in 1938.

This negative attention to the American Nazis was not to the liking of Hitler, who wanted the Nazi Party in America to be strong, but stealthy. Hitler wanted the U.S. to stay neutral throughout the war. Any American resentment towards the Nazi Party was too dangerous. On the other hand, Fritz Kuhn was only looking to stir more attention from the media.

In 1939, seeking to cripple the Bund, New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia had the city investigate the Bund's taxes. It found that Kuhn had embezzled over $14,000 from the Bund, spending part of that money on a mistress. District Attorney Thomas E. Dewey issued an indictment and won a conviction against Kuhn. On December 5, 1939, he was sentenced to two and a half to five years in prison for tax evasion and embezzlement. Despite his criminal conviction for embezzlement, followers of the Bund continued to hold him in high regard, in line with the classical precepts of Fuhrerprinzip common to all Nazis.

During World War II, Kuhn was arrested as an enemy agent after his release from prison, and held by the federal government at an internment camp in Crystal City, Texas. His citizenship was canceled on June 1, 1943. In 1945, he was released, sent to Ellis Island, and deported to Germany.